


batter my heart

by catchpenny



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Canon Era, Consensual Violence, Dom/sub Undertones, F/M, Female Grantaire, Frottage, Heterosexual Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 06:11:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2218758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catchpenny/pseuds/catchpenny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Enjolras perceives a need, and answers it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	batter my heart

**Author's Note:**

> That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend  
> Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.

It's almost a quarter-hour after the last of their friends leaves that Enjolras lifts his beautiful head, coming abruptly out of his meditation on whatever outrage the deputies or Charles le roi have committed most recently and most egregiously. He absorbs Grantaire's presence, and frowns. 

"Please," Grantaire says, twisting her unbeautiful hands. They both know what she means.

"It's been less than a month."

"I thirst, nevertheless."

"You thirst too much, and too often," Enjolras says. Nevertheless, he pushes his chair away from the table, folds his own arms, and waits.

It should be humiliating to come so quickly to heel at Enjolras's signal, but doing so starts something fluttering in her belly and makes her breathe a little faster.

There's still a moment of hesitation when she's standing before him, close enough to touch. He's not looking at her anymore. The papers on the table hold him again. He won't give her any instruction in this. It's for her, not him. Grantaire still fears striking out too far on her own recognisance and disgusting him. 

She can still scarcely believe that this is permitted, and yet - It is. This pure and golden youth permits her to sit in his presence, to come near him. To come to him, despite her faults. He's a boy, whatever tally of years he claims, and she's a woman with one husband buried in her past already, and a need for wine that doesn't abate. She's not thirty yet, but she's old and spoiled in every way Enjolras is young and clean. There are cobweb bursts of veins on her cheeks that have little to do with how often she pinches them to make them glow, and no man has ever gone to bed with her for her beauty rather than her breasts. 

He pushed his chair back. That's her cue. "I could ride you like a horse," Grantaire says thickly, settling in his lap. She shifts until she's straddling his thigh, and rocks, illustratively. No response; she continues to rock until it's less of a tease and more in earnest. This is how she'd fuck him, if he let her. 

"That resembles no horse-riding of my experience."

"And what experience is that?" 

It's a jeer, and Enjolras doesn't answer it. Grantaire hitches up her skirts until she's bare underneath them against the leg of his trousers, the texture of the cloth rubbing roughly against her nakedness. The muscle in his leg underneath the cloth is hard, tensed. 

It's the stimulation she wanted, but not enough, and she tugs her bodice low enough to pop her breasts out. 

Enjolras proves himself more than a man and doesn't glance at them. He'd looked the first time, but without the appreciation or prurience Grantaire's used to. He doesn't look now, and in the face of his intimate indifference, Grantaire pinches her own nipples as she industriously fucks herself home on his thigh. It's not enough when she comes, a minor spasm of sweetness that barely blossoms before it slips away.

"Ah," she sighs, and butts hard against his trouser-leg as her cunt clenches, trying to draw it out. She makes a disappointed sound low in her throat as it fades. When she slows, Enjolras takes her chin between his fingers and lifts her face. 

"You truly need this," he observes levelly. "It's necessary for you, like the wine."

"If I thirst for wine, I can drink until I pass out," Grantaire says, and her voice is not as even as she means it to be. "This – " This has no bottom to it, no end in sight. She closes her eyes, defeated, and begins to move against his thigh once more. "Yes, I need it."

"Take it, then."

"What do you think I'm doing?" She pinches her nipple, harder this time.

"Staining my trousers," Enjolras says, and removes her hand from her breast. 

It's true. Grantaire's rutted herself halfway raw on them. She's scented his linen like a civet cat. This is what her admiration amounts to: a selfish need to possess the beloved that can only find expression in a degradation that reveals her own baseness. Still -

"No," Grantaire pleads, still grinding, and mindlessly rubs her nipples against his chest when he won't let her pinch them again. His waistcoat is made of some stiff coarse stuff, its metal buttons cold shocks. "I need -"

She nearly moans with frustration when he pushes her off his lap. Frustration – and fear, that she's gone too far, asked too much of him, and now he'll send her away. It's commonly accepted that the one thing Enjolras has never quite managed to achieve is to rebuke Grantaire harshly enough to make her quit their company – that there's no such rebuke, that whatever he says Grantaire will take it, and smile; will stare at his distant beauty with unshaken fondness, and perhaps jest a little once he's passed beyond hearing.

But if she managed at last to leave an imprint of her own on his stony surface – to seep into its pores, stain the pale grain of it until it looks like one of those ornamental tables brought back from Italy in Napoleon's train – if that mark was repugnance, that would be enough. That would send her away forever.

"Enjolras," she begs, on her knees. Her hair has come down, rough dark curls in her eyes. She must look like the lowest sort of woman, a slut with her breasts bare and her nipples swollen. "Enjolras – ” 

and oh. Oh, he's hard right through his trousers, an angry line of cock clear at the inside of his thigh, pushing at the fabric. His face is still as pale and remote as an ivory carving. 

Enjolras doesn't like women. Nor does he dislike them. He simply looks past them like they're part of the plasterwork. He grants them only a pinch of thought in his plans for the future, where they will be valued and educated – as mothers of France who teach its children at their knees. Perhaps the reason he dislikes Grantaire – or, rather, so much of what Grantaire says and does and professes to believe – is because she will never be capable of filling the role Enjolras has set aside for women in his schismatic plans. What small abstract purpose he allows them, she lacks. Grantaire's a glass with a crack in it, made to hold water but unable to stop it rushing away, a flawed thing fit only to be discarded: squeezing herself into a shape she's not meant for, joining a fraternity of idealists when she meets none of the standards for membership.

"I'll suck you off," she offers more explicitly, and it's a plea. A humiliatingly earnest one, because a betraying rush of saliva fills her mouth at the thought of it. She wants to make him come in turn so desperately it's almost painful, a metaphysical ache worse than the needy one between her legs. 

Enjolras shakes his head. "The table."

Grantaire doesn't waste time. She fills the empty space where his chair stood and bends over it. He stops her with a hand on her wrist when she tries to hike up her skirts, and the clamp of his fingers makes her groan and push her hips back against him.

His grip tightens. "No."

"No?" It's a whine. What need does Grantaire have for dignity? 

Just enough not to beg him to fuck her properly, because he won't. Enjolras doesn't have carnal needs - or at least they don't drive him cruelly enough to make bodily fulfillment necessary to health and happiness. If his flesh stirs - and Grantaire once doubted that it did, but now she knows better - he can ignore it. 

The edge of the table is a hard line digging into her thighs, and Enjolras's hands are on her wrists, the only place they touch skin to skin. She'll have bruises from his fingertips tomorrow. The seam of his cock presses against her backside, palpable through his clothes and hers.

"Ah," Grantaire croaks into the table, moving back against him in vain search for contact. When Enjolras starts moving, the rhythm is hard and punishing and doesn't come close to hitting where she needs it. This is his retribution for making his body rouse, this simulacrum of what she wants and can't have. "More, please – "

Enjolras relents. He releases one wrist briefly, in order to lift her skirt, and Grantaire spreads her thighs wider, encouraging him to grind her into the edge of the table, rock his covered crotch into her naked one. The friction makes her throb. He fucks her dry until she comes, and through it, until she twists under him, trying to shift away from the continuous physical assault. 

"No more," Grantaire sobs finally. "Enjolras – I can't. No more." It's a lie: they both know she can. It feels true in this moment. 

"This is for you," Enjolras reminds her. He sounds his usual dispassionate self, only slightly breathless. "This is to assuage _your_ uncontrollable desires. Have you achieved your end? Shall I stop?"

"No," Grantaire grits out. Enjolras grinds savagely against her, pressing the point, and she clenches her teeth. "No – only, not like this. Take your trousers down."

He stops thrusting. The sudden silence is stern. She can guess what he's thinking: that he's overestimated her comprehension yet again, or she's vastly underestimated his.

"Not that," she says in haste. "I wouldn't – Angel of the revolutionary apocalypse; I could never ask that of you. I meant only – as you were, but sans-culottes. It would be a mercy, to be tender where I'm likewise."

Enjolras drops both her wrists. Grantaire presses her forehead against the table and shuts her eyes. 

When he presses himself against her again he's naked, the bones of his hips stark points against her backside. His cock – his _cock_. It fits in the cradle of her cunt like it's made to, sliding back and forth between her swollen lips. There's enough slickness to make everything tortuously easy, and not all of it's coming from her.

"You feel," Enjolras says unevenly. Something has come unstrung in the instrument of his voice. "You feel –" 

He doesn't finish his sentence.

Grantaire's gone from too sensitive to painfully, exquisitely aroused again, deeper than the more superficial desire of earlier, and harder to satisfy. Each long, slow movement makes her writhe and whimper, each lingering rub of his cockhead against her clitoris. He never draws back quite enough to tease at the empty clutch of her hole itself, but that avoidance is a delicate torture all on its own.

On it goes, maddeningly gentle. He's fucking her. Sophists might insist on penetration – priests certainly do – but this is fucking: Grantaire's done enough of it in her life to know. Enjolras's breath on the back of her neck and her arching back towards him, his cock sliding back and forth between her folds and making her gasp with every thrust.

"Iesu Christi," Grantaire manages, working her hips, trying to get more of him. She's always closest to religious when she's close to coming. A particularly desperate movement of hers just as he's moving in the right way at the right angle - the head of his cock breaches her, popping through with the inexorable ease inherent in its design, and Grantaire moans deliriously and screws herself backwards, trying to impale herself.

Suddenly Enjolras is gone completely, leaving her bent over the table and alone. His breathing is harsh and loud behind her, and Grantaire sobs,

"I didn't – Angel, I didn't mean to – I couldn’t help it.”

“You could,” Enjolras says coldly. “You didn’t want to. You snatch, Grantaire. You’re selfish, and you care only for your own short-sighted gratification. You’re a voluptuary. The body means more to you than the mind; than the soul.”

“I care for your soul –”

“You’ve never perceived it, only what you wish it to be.”

“Punish me,” Grantaire says desperately. “Lash me with your hand; better that than your tongue. I too have a soul, you know, and a heart; I’d rather you flogged my body.” Her breath shudders. She says, with wistful irony, “Be tender where I’m likewise. Use your belt.” 

His face tightens, stone come to life. “That’s what this was in aid of?” 

“I deserve it.”

“You do.” Enjolras puts his hands on her shoulders and pins her back in place upon the table of her crucifixion. Grantaire sobs with gratitude this time. She’d feared the Rubicon, that she’d pushed too far and thus foregone his touch forever. She still wants, needs, to come again. "Perhaps I judge you too harshly. Your will is weak; should I wonder that your body is likewise?”

“Yes, yes,” Grantaire says mindlessly. His hand is running up the length of her naked thigh. The slap, when it comes, is a shock. Enjolras hasn’t beaten her bare-handed before. 

He pauses, testing, checking. “Another?”

_“Yes.”_

“How many would satisfy you?”

“No such number,” Grantaire says, and makes a gargoyle face of doleful self-acknowledgement into the table-top. “Try your arm, and we’ll find out.”

“You’re boastful, too,” Enjolras says, marking off another entry on his list of her many faults in character. 

He slaps her again before she’s braced for it, and again, flat-palmed tingling slaps that make her burn with feeling. He slaps at her thighs and backside until she parts her legs and begs him to slap her between them, please, please, slaps her cunt and her clitoris until it feels like her heart is beating just under the surface and every nerve is throbbing with it, until she’s red and sore and swollen; and wet, so wet. What she needs is for him to shove his cock in her and fuck her sorer still, but Enjolras has refined cruelty into a restraint that only drives her wilder. 

He doesn’t mean to be cruel. Grantaire knows that. He means to be kind, as much as he can be in his unbending self. He's capable of pity. That he does this for her is generous of him, an answer to a need he acknowledges and perceives as real. His flesh may rise, but it doesn’t do so without discomforting him, and he will never seek its fulfilment in her body. Enjolras is a natural Spartan who spends only on his sheets in his sleep.

He probably washes his belly in the morning with his thoughts turned somewhere else, the way a normal man wipes his nose.

Enjolras perceives a need, and answers it. "You're tight," he says when he pushes two fingers into her. The surprise in his voice is not flattering. 

I've been good, Grantaire wants to tell him. She bites her lip to keep herself quiet. Practically a nun, rubbing herself off in bed alone to memories of his hands. She’s stopped fooling herself, stopped imagining that she can fill that need with other men. They can't give her what she wants, and trying to take it from them hollows her out and leaves her emptier than before. The only time he used the belt, she came to him loose and with another man’s come slipping between her thighs, and he didn’t touch her with his hands that night at all.

Two fingers isn’t enough. She’s so sore and overstimulated that the penetration burns, but when she squeezes down she’s not full enough to satisfy the inflamed ache of her, the overwhelming thought-blotting mindless need to come again. Enjolras gives her more when she asks for it, fucks her with his hand until she’s moaning a hoarse ecstatic stream of nonsense and tightening her cunt around him hungrily. 

One day when he’s fucking her like this, Grantaire will beg him to fist her until she's as full of him as she can get. She wants all of him. She wants to eat him alive like one of those ancient Eastern goddesses that devoured their lovers whole and smiled afterwards like the sphinx.

Finally, Grantaire comes in sublime pulses around the thick wedge of his hand. When she finally stops clenching, Enjolras twists his hand inside her and rubs her clitoris with the pad of his thumb in ruthless circles until she comes again.

“No more,” she says at last, cringing away. He doesn’t stop, though he slows.

“Are you certain?” 

He could force another orgasm out of her if she said no. Grantaire can’t, in this moment, imagine how, but she doesn’t underestimate Enjolras. She’s too overwrought to speak, so she nods, wearily, and her silence satisfies him enough that he takes his hand away.

The table is the only thing holding her up. Her legs are pudding and her belly is a blancmange. 

Enjolras settles back in the abandoned chair. He straightens his collar and waistcoat, frowns, and searches for his handkerchief. When Grantaire finally peels herself off the furniture and paws stupidly at her hiked skirts, he’s started wiping his hands clean with methodical care. There’s a wet patch on his trousers, just at the inside of the thigh, and further down they’re cloudy with her fluids.

“I am too soft with you,” Enjolras says, not looking at her.

“You keep me virtuous,” Grantaire says. “As much as I can manage, in any case.”

“Will that keep you satisfied?”

“For a considerable time.” She wonders if she can manage the short distance to her tenement. She’ll walk it spraddle-legged with tenderness.

He doesn't look at her. “Come to me if you must. Don’t debase yourself with other men.”

“And make your sacrifice meaningless?” 

Enjolras turns his head fractionally. “I don’t grudge it. I know that you require – that you need it. This roughness.”

“You; not merely _it_.”

“Grantaire," warningly. Enjolras starts tidying the table-top, returning the shoved-aside piles of paper and stacks of books to where they were previously, and that's another signal. It means, leave.

“Monsieur,” she says, meaning it, and thinks about kneeling by the chair to kiss his hand. She’d be able to taste herself on it; but that would put him to the necessity of cleaning it again.


End file.
